Talking with Serial Killers: Dead Men Talking. Christopher Berry-Dee
was that he had never done an honest day’s work in his life.
Initially, the Robinsons moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where he attended a trade school to learn the radiology profession. True to form, JR never finished his training but this did not prevent him from getting a job at a children’s hospital where he papered the walls of his office with fake diplomas and certificates. From his lack of skills with the infant patients his colleagues suspected that he was either a fake or one of the most incompetent technicians ever to practise his craft. Although hospital staff remembered him as being a nice enough young man they knew that no way was he a certified technician. Josephine Bermel, who worked with Robinson, said that he simply couldn’t cope with young patients: ‘We had to teach him how to do things properly,’ she said. This downright incompetence cost him his first job. He was just 21 at the time and his wife had recently given birth to their first child.
Undaunted by this setback, and using his phoney diplomas and certificates, JR soon found work as an X-ray technician at a medical practice in Kansas City. Here, he was employed by retired Brigadier General Dr Wallace Harry Graham, who for many years had been the personal White House physician to no less eminent patients than the former US President Harry S Truman and his wife, Elizabeth. Although, as Dr Graham himself told the New York Times Magazine in 1964, ‘The Trumans were healthy. I felt like the country’s most disemployed doctor.’
In the spring of 1944, as a member of the First Hospital Unit of the First Army, Captain (later Colonel) Wallace Graham had waded ashore at ‘Easy Red’ Omaha Beach, four days after D- Day. With the battle raging just a few miles ahead, he treated the wounded in the thick of battle and, by nightfall, his tents, with 400 beds, had taken in close to 900 of the wounded. Moving across France and Belgium, then into Germany, his unit saw some of the war’s bitterest engagements, including the Battle of the Bulge, where he was wounded. He was awarded the Bronze Star, and other decorations, as well as medals from France, Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium.
While in the White House, where he had a ground floor suite of offices filled with the latest in medical technology, he also treated some of the senior staffers, and later became a temporary Major General of the Air Force. He continued to look after the Trumans in their hometown of Independence, Missouri. When the 70-year-old President was rushed to Kansas City Hospital for emergency surgery in 1954, it was Dr Graham who removed his gallbladder and appendix. He had earned his medical degree at Harvard Medical School. He developed a lifelong interest in botany and also boxed. It seems that the doctor’s only misjudgement throughout his entire, distinguished life was taking on John Robinson.
Quite how Robinson managed to con his way into working for Dr Graham as a lab technician and officer manager is a question for another day, but the doctor was patently no fool. Dr Graham later recalled that he had been impressed with Robinson’s achievements as an Eagle Scout and his ‘extensive credentials’ in radiology. Nevertheless, highly regarded in the community, Dr Graham was a trusting man so he turned out to be an easy mark for a pathological and plausible liar like Robinson.
Soon after taking up his new appointment with Dr Graham, John made a somewhat astute discovery, which developed into an abiding, lifelong attachment to the buoyant pleasures to be had from fleecing almost everyone he came across. The upshot was that he developed the disagreeable technique of making himself wealthy at the expense of others whom he made extremely poor – something the banks have been trying to do for decades. From then on, and to this day, dishonest thoughts occupied every space in John’s head; he pushed honesty completely to the back of his mind.
Robinson started his criminal activities in 1967, but he soon came unstuck when he was placed on probation for three years for embezzling $33,000 from 57-year-old Dr Graham. JR started by stealing and taking liberties in the practice’s medical office. He boasted to friends and colleagues about a house he had bought. In addition, he engaged in sexual liaisons with both office staff and patients – having sex with one patient in the X- ray lab by pretending his wife was terminally ill and unable to satisfy him sexually.
But how did JR find the money to buy the house? The answer is simple; he drained the practice’s bank account to the extent that just six months after he had been taken on, a bewildered and intractably confused Dr Graham was unable to pay Christmas bonuses to his staff. This unexplained loss of revenue prompted an audit of the practice’s books and accusatory fingers all pointed towards Robinson being the culprit. JR was arrested and marched away in handcuffs feigning sincerity and remorse, praying that his hand-wringing, accompanied by an ‘I’m sorry’, would get him nothing more than a slap on the wrist from the criminal justice system. And he was correct.
In 1969 Robinson was convicted of the theft. Because it was his first offence and, pledging restitution, a Jackson County judge exercised leniency, sentencing him to three years probation. Dr Graham never saw a cent of the money JR had stolen from him.
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JR’s next career move was as the manager of a TV rental company. He soon tuned in to stealing merchandise from this employer too. When he was exposed, the company did not prosecute him, but sack him they most certainly did.
Over the next decade Robinson was often in trouble with the police. But despite being on parole for most of this time he still managed to prosper. When asked about his initial meeting with Robinson, one employer said: ‘He gave a very good impression, well dressed, nice-looking… seemed to know a lot, very glib and a good speaker. He defrauded tens of thousands of dollars from various companies to help him along the way.’
Robinson? I wouldn’t leave him alone in my yard to wash my truck. That sumbitch would steal the car, the hose, the faucet, and carry away as much fuckin’ water as he could.
Jeff Tietz, former Kansas City police officer.
Giving credit where credit is due, if John Robinson was anything, he was pathologically persistent and remarkably evasive. For the next twenty years he bounced from job to job, managing to keep out of prison by crossing his fingers and jurisdictional boundaries, and convincing employers not to press charges when he was found out.
In 1977, JR bought a large, waterfront house. It was set in four acres of prime real estate at Pleasant Valley Farms, an affluent and prosperous neighbourhood in Johnson County, Kansas. By now, he and Nancy had four children and it was here, in picturesque, rural surroundings, that the confidence trickster and embezzler formed a company called Hydro-Gro Inc. The firm ostensibly dealt in hydroponics, a method – as any home-grown cannabis enthusiast will know – of growing plants using mineral nutrient solutions, heat and, instead of soil, a hell of a lot of water.
JR’s home-grown publicity literature (a glossy, 64-page brochure) portrayed him as a ‘sought-after lecturer’, ‘author’ and ‘pioneer in hydroponics’. The latter claim would have certainly come as a surprise to the ancients, as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Aztec’s Floating Gardens of Mexico and those of the Chinese are far earlier examples of hydroponic culture. Indeed, Egyptian hieroglyphic records, dating back several hundred years BC, describe the growing of plants in water, so hydroponics is hardly a new method of growing plants. But by the 1970s, it wasn’t just scientists and analysts, many of whom worked for NASA, who were involved in hydroponics. The many virtues of hydroponic growing began to attract traditional farmers and eager hobbyists, but John E Robinson was not, and this will come as no surprise, listed among them.
Hydro-Gro Inc was, of course, a bogus set-up, and in its development he swindled a friend out of $25,000. The man had invested because he hoped to get a better investment return to pay for his dying wife’s medical care.
With his phoney CV in radiography and hydroponics richly embroidered in merit and distinction, this devious Jack-of-all- trades-and-master-of-none managed to engineer his appointment to the board of governors of a workshop for disabled people. He had held this position for little more than two months when this self-proclaimed philanthropist, with an almost religious desire to help the developmentally disabled, was named ‘Man of the Year’ for his work with the handicapped.
Amidst the glare of much publicity, the Kansas City Times proclaimed Robinson’s virtues and, at a special dinner and presentation ceremony, JR was given a grandiose